Dr. Leonard Calabrese
Appearances
The Dr. Hyman Show
Toxic Food & Hidden Chemicals Are Everywhere: Here's What You Can Do
Yeah, you know, I'm glad you brought that up. And diving into the science just a little bit, I mean, the microbiome, which is connected to every organ system in our body, and you've talked about it extensively on this show, is... critical in both the development and the function of our immune system.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Toxic Food & Hidden Chemicals Are Everywhere: Here's What You Can Do
I mean, if you're born with a sterile gut, you're immunodeficient, and we know that from animal models, we know it from people. we know a lot about and you just i you've had dr hazen on the shows studied this in the most you know robust scientific way possible um you know we know what a healthy microbiome kind of looks like you know diverse and rich
The Dr. Hyman Show
Toxic Food & Hidden Chemicals Are Everywhere: Here's What You Can Do
You know, we've yet to dial it in to this organism, that organism. So, you know, we know that good diets that people that eat real food, you know, usually have a more diverse and rich microbiome, and that supports immunologic health. I'm reluctant to tell people, you know, Carl Sagan used to say that extraordinary claims require extraordinary data.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Toxic Food & Hidden Chemicals Are Everywhere: Here's What You Can Do
And so we don't know how to reduce it to that crystallized, eat this, do this, one thing. It's probably much more complicated than that. But we do know that prudent diets versus sad diets have a huge effect on humans.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Toxic Food & Hidden Chemicals Are Everywhere: Here's What You Can Do
Absolutely. Yeah.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Toxic Food & Hidden Chemicals Are Everywhere: Here's What You Can Do
So the next topic would be, you said exercise. Exercise. So I've been interested in exercise and immunity for decades. Decades, actually, probably one of the first areas of behavior and immunity that I became interested in. And it's a it's a it's a complex area to talk. So over the past many years, I try to invite world leaders in all of these areas to my center to visit.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Toxic Food & Hidden Chemicals Are Everywhere: Here's What You Can Do
And last year we had David Neiman, who is one of the leaders. undisputed leaders in this field. And, you know, I do believe in what we call the J curve of exercise, that people who are sedentary, people who are sedentary are immunocompromised.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Toxic Food & Hidden Chemicals Are Everywhere: Here's What You Can Do
And we know this both from the laboratory and the risks of, you know, the kind of the canary in the coal mine that we measure usually is respiratory illnesses. And how many is normal and how many do you get? Being a couch potato is bad for your immune system. It is definitely bad for your immune system as well as virtually every other system in your body.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Toxic Food & Hidden Chemicals Are Everywhere: Here's What You Can Do
But I'm looking from the lens of immunologic strength.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Toxic Food & Hidden Chemicals Are Everywhere: Here's What You Can Do
This is it. The thing that you can do to demonstrate immunologic enhancement is moderate exercise. And, you know, moderate exercise is still a moving target. And, you know, if we look at the guidelines which have been recently revamped, only in the past couple of months, you know, walking is an incredible form of immunologic strength building.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Toxic Food & Hidden Chemicals Are Everywhere: Here's What You Can Do
And we actively endorse and what we talk to about our patients is just like with the diet, tell me where you're at in this spectrum of exercise. Are you the couch potato and you work in a cubicle and you're sitting there all day long and you're doing nothing? Or are you training for ultramarathons at the other end? No matter where you are, we try to move people down a bit at a time.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Toxic Food & Hidden Chemicals Are Everywhere: Here's What You Can Do
And Betsy and I, my nurse practitioner, world's best nurse practitioner, we talk to our patients about instant recess. That's what we call it. We say, you know, if you're totally sedentary,
The Dr. Hyman Show
Toxic Food & Hidden Chemicals Are Everywhere: Here's What You Can Do
just get up and start moving and now i'm copying you so in my immunologic summits for the past two years i invite our head yoga teacher from the cleveland clinic judy who comes and we do yoga at all the sessions so the first time i did this at a scientific meeting these guys are like What?
The Dr. Hyman Show
Toxic Food & Hidden Chemicals Are Everywhere: Here's What You Can Do
And now it's like so popular. So anyway, we start moving the needle down to moderate exercise. There still is some data and there's some controversy that's recently been added into this. You know, the middle path is very strong for health and wellness, right? And, you know, you can... too much of something is often as bad as not doing it.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Toxic Food & Hidden Chemicals Are Everywhere: Here's What You Can Do
And there have been a lot of epidemiologic evidence to show people who are ultra-exercisers can actually do harm. Like marathon runners. And beyond. Now we have people, ultra-marathon runners. I don't think it's coincidental, and I'm sure you've seen this in your practice. I've seen many people who have developed
The Dr. Hyman Show
Toxic Food & Hidden Chemicals Are Everywhere: Here's What You Can Do
you know, what we would recognize now as chronic fatigue syndrome, who had started out as very high endurance athletes, and then something has fallen apart. And you just wonder in your head of whether this was a predisposing factor, but we get people moving. So there was a very interesting study done at the University of Colorado in the last about 18 months, where they experimentally
The Dr. Hyman Show
Toxic Food & Hidden Chemicals Are Everywhere: Here's What You Can Do
took a group of people who work at a sedentary job, a cubicle, sit there all day long, and they randomized them to you get to go to a gym and come in a half hour late, and you do 30 minutes on the treadmill. versus you who all you have to do is for five hours during the day, get up and walk around five minutes out of each hour, five minutes out of each hour.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Toxic Food & Hidden Chemicals Are Everywhere: Here's What You Can Do
And then they measured a number of outputs. And while they didn't do immunologic function, they looked at vitality, well-being, mood, et cetera. The people who won were the people who were just getting up and moving. Walking around. Yeah. You need a step counter. The 10,000 steps. All of that stuff that Mike Roizen talks about and our whole enterprise engages in. I think it's good for your body.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Toxic Food & Hidden Chemicals Are Everywhere: Here's What You Can Do
It's good for your brain. And it's clearly good for your immune system. So it's just a small bit of data. And similar to what we talked about from the nurse's health study in...
The Dr. Hyman Show
Toxic Food & Hidden Chemicals Are Everywhere: Here's What You Can Do
on diet, there've been several large epidemiologic studies to show that people who carry the predisposition to rheumatoid arthritis, who are more physically active, will have a lower incidence of actually developing the disease over a lifetime. So you've got two areas that there's clearly enough data for so many reasons, cardiovascular health, emotional wellbeing, and immunologic strength.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Toxic Food & Hidden Chemicals Are Everywhere: Here's What You Can Do
It's actually still relatively poorly understood if you divide it into two types of studies. One are the studies where you can do it in a lab and come in and do an exhaustive stress test or cycle until you've hit the oxidation wall and you're hit your aerobic capacity. There, it's not surprising that all types of things happen to your immune system. You have trafficking of immunologic cells.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Toxic Food & Hidden Chemicals Are Everywhere: Here's What You Can Do
You have elevations of inflammatory cytokines. Those are the mediators that cause inflammation and redistribution of lymphocytes like T cells and B cells. I've always said, well, I would expect that. That's just stress and your immune system is moving to stress. The more
The Dr. Hyman Show
Toxic Food & Hidden Chemicals Are Everywhere: Here's What You Can Do
Important question is if you take a person who's sedentary and a person who has moderate activity and a person who is an ultramarathoner, do their immune systems differ by what we have traditionally measured, T cells and B cells and inflammatory cytokines and the like? And the answer is there's very little difference that we can detect. And my response to that is that we have very poor tools.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Toxic Food & Hidden Chemicals Are Everywhere: Here's What You Can Do
We're just now- We're looking with an eyeglass instead of a telescope, right? We're looking at the same techniques that we looked at 40 years ago, where in the next five years, we'll be looking with what we recognize as omic technologies, where we're looking at the entire cloud of data of how your genes are functioning and how your proteome and metabolome
The Dr. Hyman Show
Toxic Food & Hidden Chemicals Are Everywhere: Here's What You Can Do
So some of that work is starting to be done right now. And I look forward to seeing more of it.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Toxic Food & Hidden Chemicals Are Everywhere: Here's What You Can Do
It really is. I think that this is the most exciting area going on in immune behavioral science right now. And the data that are being generated are pretty impressive. So let's just talk about, let me back up and give you just a magic minute on triggering the immune system. So we have this immune system here. It's designed to defend us from all types of dangerous signals.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Toxic Food & Hidden Chemicals Are Everywhere: Here's What You Can Do
We traditionally think of that as external signals such as infections, and it certainly does all that. There is another... set of danger signals that we are just now starting to understand. And you brought up the term psychoneuroimmunology. Mouthful. It is. It is. And it's your psyche, your nervous system, and your immune system.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Toxic Food & Hidden Chemicals Are Everywhere: Here's What You Can Do
We don't know what stress levels were 200, 500, 5,000 years ago, but we do know that today, living in this world, stresses are different. You're carrying your phone in your pocket. I had to turn it off when I came in here, and I'm probably already getting nervous about how many emails are stacking up while I'm having this nice conversation with you.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Toxic Food & Hidden Chemicals Are Everywhere: Here's What You Can Do
The, you know, the exigencies of modern life are complicated. Add to that the environmental stresses. You know, we're living in a world where, you know, the temperature is rising, pollutants are increasing. are bombarding our body, those are danger signals. And so there is a tonic level of stress there that I think is probably new in the industrial age. Processing that is our brain by and large.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Toxic Food & Hidden Chemicals Are Everywhere: Here's What You Can Do
And the brain can send signals to the body that promote inflammation. You know, inflammation is good when you cut your finger. It's bad when you have it for 10 years. So the immune system is triggered by stress to generate inflammation.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Toxic Food & Hidden Chemicals Are Everywhere: Here's What You Can Do
accelerated inflammation, which contributes to all these immune-mediated inflammatory diseases that we're talking about, contributes to acceleration of aging, and that includes aging of the immune system. And we have this great term called immunosenescence. It doesn't sound good. It does not sound good, right. So all of this is going on.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Toxic Food & Hidden Chemicals Are Everywhere: Here's What You Can Do
That's right. So with that as a background, the question is, what the heck do we do about it?
The Dr. Hyman Show
Toxic Food & Hidden Chemicals Are Everywhere: Here's What You Can Do
It's mapped out in incredible detail. And we can look at people who have mood disorders. We can look at people who are caregivers for patients with cancer or dementia. We can look at people with PTSD. We can look at all of these populations. And there's profound perturbation of their immune response. So how do we move that needle? How can we do that?
The Dr. Hyman Show
Toxic Food & Hidden Chemicals Are Everywhere: Here's What You Can Do
Well, there are a variety of techniques, but the ones that have been best studied surround the use of mindfulness meditation. And I'd like to just take a couple minutes to talk about this with you, because I know that you're a great practitioner. And so for those in your audience who are well familiar with this, the cognitively-based mindfulness-based stress reduction developed by Jon Kabat-Zinn
The Dr. Hyman Show
Toxic Food & Hidden Chemicals Are Everywhere: Here's What You Can Do
25, 30 years ago has been the standard bearer of research. And, you know, I give unbelievable credit to his pioneering efforts and all the data that's been generated for this. But as you know, this is pretty demanding stuff. And, you know, day of introduction, you know, you have coursework.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Toxic Food & Hidden Chemicals Are Everywhere: Here's What You Can Do
I always said if I had enough time for CBCT, I wouldn't be stressed. Mindfulness-based stress reduction. I'm sorry, mindfulness-based stress reduction. So I've been asking the question for the past number of years whether lower doses of of mindfulness can, uh, have beneficial effects on all the domains that, uh, MBSR, um, uh, has, uh, had effects on. All right.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Toxic Food & Hidden Chemicals Are Everywhere: Here's What You Can Do
So an hour twice a day, maybe there's like a different dose. So, uh, you know, we have a program that develops at the Cleveland clinic, um, stress-free now, um, and stress-free now has been used, uh, in multiple settings. And we've published in scientific literature, you know, when, you know,
The Dr. Hyman Show
Toxic Food & Hidden Chemicals Are Everywhere: Here's What You Can Do
hundreds of engineers have taken this people from call-in centers that are all stressed out that 15 minutes four times a week appears to lower stress levels minutes twice a week 15 minutes four times a week seems to be a sweet spot which is you know that's doable We've also developed a program, which you can get on your app, called Stress-Free Now for Healers. And I designed this program.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Toxic Food & Hidden Chemicals Are Everywhere: Here's What You Can Do
God knows we need it. You know, we're talking about burnout and all the stresses of this. So I couldn't Stan, the thought of trying to tell some neurosurgeon he has to meditate for an hour a day to reduce his stress, he'd probably club me over the head. Right, right. So we're introducing this smaller dose. So now with this, so we know that it reduces stress.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Toxic Food & Hidden Chemicals Are Everywhere: Here's What You Can Do
So now we have a study that is going on. We just launched it. And we're getting scores of people interested and participating. We're doing it within our own system. So we're taking Stress-Free Now for Healers, this low-dose meditation that can be used on your app, can be used at your workstation computer. And we're going to take nurses who are undergoing occupational stress.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Toxic Food & Hidden Chemicals Are Everywhere: Here's What You Can Do
And over a six-week period, we're going to study them. But the primary endpoint is not going to be reducing their stress. The primary endpoint is we're going to look at how this affects how their genes function. So we're doing what we call next-generation sequencing. We're looking at the entire function of the genome.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Toxic Food & Hidden Chemicals Are Everywhere: Here's What You Can Do
And then we're looking at all these interleukins. Inflammatory molecules. Inflammatory molecules of the immune system. And it'll be the largest study done of its type. None has been done in the healthcare setting. None has been done with this low dose. And we just are so excited about working with this.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Toxic Food & Hidden Chemicals Are Everywhere: Here's What You Can Do
and i will tell your your audience so if you're interested in and follow me uh this work along and my kind of world view on this uh you know uh follow me on twitter yes l calabrese do and uh i would uh you know get my uh wild and wacky view of uh the immune system and behavior but this is where we want to go we want to plumb that and mike roizen and i have had this discussion he thinks that
The Dr. Hyman Show
Toxic Food & Hidden Chemicals Are Everywhere: Here's What You Can Do
We should be looking at six minutes of mindfulness meditation. I don't know what the answer is, but that's where our studies are going to be going in the future.